Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah. By R. Warren Metcalf. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xx, 305 pp., ISBN 0-8032-3201-2.) [Review]

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Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah. By R. Warren Metcalf. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xx, 305 pp., ISBN 0-8032-3201-2.)  [Review]

The Journal of American History
Volume 90, Number 3 (December 2003)
page 1107
DOI: 10.2307/3661030

David Rich Lewis, Professor of History
Utah State University, Logan

Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah. By R. Warren Metcalf. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xx, 305 pp., ISBN 0-8032-3201-2.)

In the 1950s the federal government reversed its pluralistic policies for revitalizing tribal governments and began terminating its trust responsibility under the guise of “freeing” American Indians from federal control. Termination policies flowed out of the conservative, budget-cutting, consensus rhetoric of Cold War America. As R. Warren Metcalf points out, its implementation varied, informed by the ideology of its practitioners and the circumstances of its subjects—specifically the Mormon cultural background of Arthur V. Watkins, Republican senator from Utah and chief advocate of termination in Congress, and the numerically small, powerless, and divided Shoshone, Paiute, and Ute Indians of Utah. Metcalf details the process whereby federal officials, Mormon politicians and lawyers, and Utes themselves accomplished the termination of mixed-blood members of the Northern Ute tribe despite the letter of the law and the bonds of racial identity. It is the story of identity politics that left individuals as “discarded” Indians…

Read the entire review here.

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